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I feel a little bit like I should find a way to work a Treebeard quote into the start of this post about haste, but then I realized that the movie really did Treebeard a disservice and those who have not read the books would likely not fully appreciate the significance or humor behind such a quote regarding tress and haste. As such, I have left out the intellectual quotes section from the beginning of this post and have instead replaced it with this somewhat awkward musing about how I was going to do something I found funny, but suspected had limited audience appeal.

Honestly, at this point, I should probably just let the quote fly and move on from it. But that’s not really my style!

I have been receiving quite a few questions on the topic of Haste lately. Those questions, in addition to something I’ve been quietly observing, have lead me to the conclusion that the topic of resto druids and haste seems to be a little bit confusing. So I thought I’d toss together a quick post that will hopefully offer some clarification on how we, as druids – not Treebeard – want to view haste this tier.

Haste vs. Mastery

There are currently two gearing options for this tier, which subsequently mean that there are two definitive haste breakpoints that you want to be looking at as you are gearing in SoO. 3043 or13163. Those are the options. There really aren’t any in betweens of note, which means any haste over 3043 that does not reach 13163 is essentially wasted itemization. This means that you are going to want to evaluate the gear you have available to you and make a decision on which of these two haste breakpoints is going to work best for you.

I’m sure that the question on everyone’s mind is: “Beru, what I really want to know is which one is better“.

Well, the truth of the matter is that they are fairly comparable and the higher of the two breakpoints is going to be highly gear dependant to reach. This means that there isn’t necessarily a cut and dry answer! Which breakpoint you opt to reach is going to be solely dependent on you! Let’s see if we can break it down a little bit!

The Mastery Build

For this build you will want to aim for 3043 haste. This will be the build for you if you are at lower gear levels – it will be very challenging, if not impossible, to achieve the higher breakpoint unless you are in heroic T15 gear or have a good amount of T16 gear. The stats are just not available on the gear before that point to make the switch.

But don’t worry! Because it’s fine! A mastery build still performs very strongly!

The first thing I want to reiterate is that if you are opting for this build, you want to be at 3043 haste. Do not try for a 6k breakpoint, do not try for an 8k breakpoint. If you can’t reach 13k, your breakpoint is going to be 3043.

Once you’ve reached the requisite amount of haste, you are going to want to reforge any excess stat (crit/haste) into mastery. You will want as many of your pieces as possible to have mastery on them. So, if possible, reforge mastery onto any piece that is lacking it! You will want to use artful, zen and fractured gems to complement this build – you should never need to utilize haste gems in this build, outside of maybe popping in a reckless to do some creative reforging.

The Haste Build

For this build you will want to aim for 13163 haste. You will want to consider this build once you have enough haste gear, plus higher secondary stats that make reforging over to this breakpoint feasible. You will likely not reach this point until you have acquired a good amount of T16 gear (or are already in higher level T15 gear). For this build, any gear that does not have inherent haste on it will require you to select a stat to reforge into haste. You can opt for Mastery, Crit or Spirit – but don’t gut your spirit past a point your are comfortable with regen.

You have a few tools to help bump your haste up if you opt for this build. You can utilize quick gems (+320 haste), Reckless gems (+160 haste) or Energized gems (+160 haste). When gemming, try to keep your socket bonuses as much as possible and if you have to, break break a weaker +60 one rather than a stronger +120 one. You can also pick up some extra haste on your gloves utilizing the greater haste enchant. However, do not forego Pandaren’s Step for the haste enchant – the run speed is too valuable for the minimal amount of haste you would be gaining.

Once you’ve reached the proper amount of haste, you will want to dump any extra stats that you haven’t converted to haste into mastery.

Just to Recap!

You will want to choose between either the 3043 and the 13163 haste breakpoints in 5.4. There is no breakpoint that is worth gearing for in between those two – so if you cannot reach the higher breakpoint gear for the lower one until you have the gear necessary for the other! If you opt for the lower one convert all extra stats to mastery. If you are using the higher one, you will likely be strapped for haste until you can acquire some of the haste rich pieces in SoO and will likely need to reforge and gem for haste!

A couple of weeks back, I finished T15. Since this is the first tier I’ve completed this expansion, I thought perhaps I’d go ahead and do a resto retrospective on how I felt about the encounters and their respective heroics this tier. Something I think it’s important to keep in mind in doing this is that about halfway through the tier, resto druids got a pretty big bump in both tranquility and wild mushrooms that significantly improved their healing and Quality of Life through the tier. While there are differing opinions on if the right things were buffed with regards to resto, I don’t think there can be any argument that both changes helped resto significantly in a world of dominating mitigation healing.

But I’m not here to talk/debate wild mushrooms and tranquility, or those pesky priests and paladins, I’m here to talk about how I felt Tier Fifteen fared to a veteran raider who has seen every raid tier in wow – or in other words, to me!

The Content

Without thinking too much about the healing the content, or each individual boss fight, and just looking at the content as a whole, I have to say that I think this has been one of my favorite raid tiers. I don’t know if it’s because I came into after taking a few months off, if I’ve got rose colored glasses from some other things, or what, but I really enjoyed this tier of content. While I was a little disappointed that the Thunder Forge didn’t actually do anything, I thought the story was compelling enough and I absolutely love troll instances.

The bosses were pretty fresh, and the content wasn’t bad either. The only complaint that I really have is that a linear instance for one this long doesn’t really work so well. I think if they had broken it up some so that you had an entry, then a few “gates”/options on what to approach next, with maybe the last couple of bosses at the end, it would have worked out better and made for smoother progression overall with less “wasted” time.

Where would I place this amongst my favorite zones? Somewhere with Black Temple, Blackwing Lair and Ulduar. And which of those was/is my favorite changes depending on the day that you ask me! But it’s safe to say that I really enjoyed Throne of Thunder and thought it was some of the best WoW raiding I’ve seen.

But enough of that! Let’s talk about what I thought about each encounter, or more specifically, which ones I thought were fun to heal! Read the rest of this entry »

Patch 5.4 looks like it’s primed to hit the PTR any day now, and the data miners have been busy pulling out all of the changes that are potentially going to be seen on the PTR. Included in them are a massive amount of resto druid changes – that is almost an entire reworking of the class mid-expansion. While these are very preliminary changes, and I would be shocked if these will hit the live server as they stand now, I thought that it would be worthwhile to take a look at them given the fact that they will have a huge impact on resto druids when they do go live.

While I am excited for many of the changes that look to be around the corner, I am also a little trepidatious about essentially relearning to play my class (again) halfway through the expansion. That being said, we were definitely in need of some big changes and much of what it looks like is in store for us looks good. As such, I’m a little conflicted but definitely leaning towards the “roll with the punches” and “don’t look a gift horse in the mouth” side of things.

So without further ado, let’s take a look at what is potentially being proposed!

(Please note that these changes are a mix of things pulled out by dataminers and listed on the official forums as PTR patch notes).

Innervate – Causes the target to regenerate mana equal to 50% of the caster’s Spirit every 1 sec for 10 sec.

So they have moved innervate away from being a set amount of our fixed mana pools to once again scaling with Spirit. From a raiding perspective, I think this is a good change. Our spirit levels as we move forward have increased and will only continue to do so – and this allows our primary source of mana regen (innervate) to scale in a somewhat similar fashion to the other healers (as opposed to always being a fixed amount with a fixed mana pool that doesn’t scale with our gear). If you are raiding current content, and you are sitting at a healthy amount of spirit (12k+), that is commonly seen once you are in full T15 gear, this will be a welcome buff to innervate.

Wild Mushroom – Grow a magical mushroom…the mushroom grows larger as it accumulates healing power from 100% of overhealing done by your Rejuvenation, but to a maximum of 200% of your health in bonus healing. Recasting Wild Mushroom will move the Mushroom without losing this accumulated healing. Wild Mushroom: Bloom can consume your Mushroom to heal nearby allies. Only 1 mushroom can be placed at a time.

This is two quality of life changes that were sorely needed!

First, you only need one – yes ONE – mushroom! Secondly, your charges will travel with your mushroom. No more clunky three clicks to place. No more charging the darn things up and then having your raid run to Timbuktu, making you start the process again. This should make mushrooms much more pleasant to utilize and much less punishing if your raid relocates after you’ve set them up. Nothing here but good things!

Wild Mushroom: Bloom – Causes your wild mushroom to bloom, healing all allies within 10 yards for 13,400 +124.2% of spell power. Bonus healing on the Wild Mushroom will be divided across all targets healed.

This change is basically just an adjustment made with the change of only being able to drop a single mushroom (as opposed to three).

Wild Mushroom: Bloom is no longer capable of critical strikes, and accumulates overhealing done by Rejuvenation by 100%, down from 150%. Overhealing bonus no longer benefits from Naturalist or Mastery: Harmony

A slight adjustment to the output of mushrooms, as well as the speed in which they (it?!) will charge. Not completely unexpected and probably well in line with the other changes that we are going to see this tier.

Nature’s Swiftness is no longer a talent, and is now an ability learned by Restoration Druids at level 30.

This is a nice change, and something that probably needed to happen given that NS was basically the only talent option to take in that tier.

Ysera’s Gift, a new talent healing the Druid for 5% of their maximum health every 5 seconds. If the Druid is at full health, it will heal the most injured friendly target nearby instead. This talent fills the spot vacated by Nature’s Swiftness

This is an interesting new talent, and certainly will add some diversity to this tier. I’m not entirely sure how it will play out versus the other two talents yet, but it at least adds some options/variety to the tier and I think has some potential to be fairly decent in a PvE setting.

Genesis is a new Restoration spell learned at level 88. Genesis targets all party or raid members within 60 yards and accelerates the casting Druid’s Rejuvenation effects, causing them to heal and expire at 500% of the normal rate. Costs the same amount of mana to cast as Rejuvenation.

I think that this spell has a lot of potential and I am thrilled to see it added to our toolkit (even if they didn’t name if Flourish!). While it doesn’t solve the great absorb problem, it does do a whole lot to give us some ability for burst healing. I like that it synergizes with one of our key spells, Rejuvenation; and I like that it adds a way for our HoTs to work in a new and unique way, while still keeping some of the flavor of being a HoT. I think that this has the potential to be a very powerful asset in our toolkit and I very much like that it will add a bit of timing to our healing that gives us the opportunity to think ahead and plan in advance for periods of burst damage.

I am really looking forward to seeing how this spell plays out on the PTR and I am hopeful that it will help bridge the gaps we’ve seen in our toolkit for over two expansions. I’m sure there will be some tweaks to it before it goes live, but I’m optimistic that the nature of the ability will remain intact.

Dream of Cenarius has been completely redesigned to reduce complexity and increase usability, but maintain the spirit of the effects. Benefits now varies by specialization: Restoration: Causes Wrath to deal 20% more damage and heals a nearby friendly target for 100% of the damage done.

Ever wish that you got atonement? Welp! Now you do! The big difference is that ours doesn’t have a chance to proc an absorb. That being said, it may well make DoC useful given the right set of circumstances, damage patterns and encounter design. It should also be noted that the cost of wrath was increased by 50%.

Heart of the Wild when activated, now also provides a 25% bonus to healing for Restoration Druids

Ok, I’ll take it. Right now the only real benefit HotW provides in a raid setting is the 6% increase to intellect, and maybe a little damage during down time. This will at least offer it a little more boost, and I imagine could be relatively powerful when paired with Tranq or our new Genesis ability.

Nature’s Vigil when activated, causes healing spells now trigger an additional heal on a nearby ally for 25% of the amount healed. This is in addition to the existing effect where it damages a nearby enemy target for 25% of the healing done.

This change to NV potentially will make it the “go to” talent in this tier. With the short CD on activation and the increased healing done, it looks to be very promising – even if it is more smart healing (sorry folks, this looks to be the way of the future!). Granted, it is still more throughput which won’t necessarily counter mitigation, but I think it has the potential to be pretty powerful.

Soul of the Forest – Restoration you gain 100% haste for your next spell when you cast Swiftmend.

Nothing really outstanding here. It’s a boost from the 75% that it is currently, but it doesn’t really do anything to change the clunkiness of SotF. To me, that means that the ability continues to be somewhat lackluster.

Glyph of Efflorescence increases the healing done by Swiftmend by 20%, causes the Efflorescence healing effect to be trigged by Wild Mushroom instead of Swiftmend, and lasts as long as the Wild Mushroom is active.

Well, this is interesting! I can’t decide what I think about this glyph yet. So…if a mushroom is down efflorescence is always present? Am I reading that right?

I do like that it bifurcates efflorescence and swiftmend. But I have mixed feelings on it if I’m reading it as I posted above. I think I want to wait and give my thoughts on this particular new (and potentially exciting) glyph after we see how it plays out on the PTR, but I will say that I don’t know if I’m thrilled about it being active…basically all of the time, with very little thought. I’m sure I’ll have more to say on this later – but my initial thought is “yay! More healing!” followed by “Yay! More healing I don’t have to think about!”. I personally think passive healing/mitigation is a problem and I don’t know that I really want the devs to keep contributing to this model.

Um…okay? I guess? I’m sure that this is meant to synergize with the four piece bonus a little bit, and I have some theories about that bonus that I will share, but this just seems a little odd to me.

Druid T16 Restoration 4P Bonus – Rejuvenation, Lifebloom, and Wild Growth critical heals have a chance to cause all cast time heals for the next 12 sec to cause a Living Seed on the target for 80% of the amount healed.

At first look, this bonus looks like garbage. And if Living Seed stays the way that it is right now, it is a pretty terrible bonus. I mean 1) you have to get a proc and then…spam RG? Seriously? And 2) Living Seed is still terrible. It requires a physical hit to proc and is a reactive ability that will frequently be high over heal.

But I have a theory, or a wish – whatever you want to call it! It is purely speculative. However, I can’t help but think that they will be adjusting living seed to become an absorb. If you look at the shaman and monk bonuses, they are both gaining an absorb mechanic. And priests and paladins already have this ability. So to me, it would make sense that they rework living seed. This takes away the need for the physical hit. It tosses druids an absorb bone. And it has the potential to really synergize with things like OoC and this four piece set bonus.

I could be way off. I could be dreaming. But I, personally, wouldn’t be surprised if we don’t see some tweaks coming out to living seed in the relative near future. Granted, the bonus still seems somewhat awkward, but less so if LS was an absorb that we could strategically toss around.

General Thoughts

Overall I’m pretty excited about the changes. However, my one concern is that all of these changes lie in our throughput, which does little to counter the great mitigation problem that has plagued throughput healers for the entirety of this expansion. I will admit that the mushroom and tranq changes that we saw in 5.3 did more to balance this than I had anticipated – but I am hesitant to buy into a slew of throughput changes really fixing the current mitigation imbalance.

I am excited for the choices that some of these new abilities will give us. And I am excited to have some tools that synergize well with our current toolkit while simultaneously looking to fix the gaps in our toolkit. In looking at these changes (save our bizarre set bonuses), I can’t help but feel that we are finally getting some much needed attention and that (aside from the mitigation issues, which really are a separate problem) the devs finally understand the shortcomings of our toolkit.

Maybe I’m being optimistic, but I am excited to see how this overhaul plays out for us on the PTR and if it helps smooth out the druid play style a little bit.

I drafted this little flow chart up for my guild to try and save myself some grey hair as we start digging into Heroic Nefarian. I have no idea if it will help, but since I had a bit of fun with it I thought I’d share :)

How to Interrupt Heroic Nefarian

A while back one of my guildmates was looking for a good guide for Resto Druid PvP, as he had just leveled his to 80 and had really gotten into the PvP aspect of the game with his druid. Naturally he asked me and I offered the following, well educated and eloquent response: “um….”. Not feeling satisfied with this, I scoured the internet long and hard looking for a definitive guide on Resto Druid PvP, I asked around on my blog if anyone had any resources for Resto Druid PvP, and still nobody had anything. Apparently the secrets of Resto Druid PvP were being tightly locked away in the tightest vault know to…well the internets! I bet the goblins of Gringots couldn’t have cracked this sucker!

Today, my friends, that has changed!

I recently received an note from Oombulance letting me know that he has finally unlocked that vault and released the secrets of Resto Druid PvP healing in his very own Resto Druid PvP Guide! I was really excited to see this guide, as I really did feel that something like this was missing in the community, so thank you Oom for all of your hard work! I finally have a reference to provide to people who ask me about PvP resources, which beats my standard response of “um….” ;)

If you have any interest in Resto PvP whatsoever, I strongly recommend going over and seeing what Oom has to say about the state of Resto Druid PvP!

Yes, I’m still here! Yes, I know it’s not Monday, but I’m behind! Between vacation, WoW and the Holidays I’m just running short on time to post as frequently as I am accustomed to doing :) The days that I work, I get home in time to raid and then have a ton of things to do after the raid (you know, like eat dinner, do my random heroic, get ready for tomorrow night’s raid, etc), and the days I don’t work…well, I’m doing a lot of playing! However, now that the rush is over, and I’m starting to fall back into a somewhat normal schedule, I suspect that my posting schedule will settle back into place as well.

Until then, let me give you a bit of (a brief) recap of what I’ve been up to lately!

On Raiding

Our 25 mans are set to start up in about 10 days, and I’m quite excited for them. In the interim we have been trucking through the new content with a 10 man group, that is constantly shifting with different members of our 25 man progression team. We have currently cleared through 8 of the 12 available encounters, and will hopefully add another one or two notches to our belt this week.

I am finding that the healing is extremely challenging, and every now and again, borderline frustrating. There are times that I just don’t feel that I have the tools to optimally do what the encounter is asking of me, and that is a bit stressful. To the point that I while I was hesitant to offer it before, I will say that I think Resto Druids need some tweaking in a PvE Raid environment. Now, I’m not saying that the sky is falling or that we are terrible healers, I just think that the way our heals are designed are not meshing well with some of the encounter mechanics…or with what the other healers can bring to a raid. I do think that resto druids, as a whole, need some re-evaluation to put us in a “good” spot.

Outside of that complaint, I am finding most of the new encounters to be enjoyable and interesting…even if Blizzard over-utilized the “get out of the bad” mechanic.

On Gear

I finally got Tyrande’s Favorite Doll. And I have to say that it’s a fantastic trinket…as long as you remember to use the cooldown! I’ve set up a Power Aura to let me know when mine was off of Cooldown. However, after last night’s Chimearon work, I realized that I wasn’t using it on cooldown as I should, and so I added a sound to the aura.

I had originally thought that the mana return had a chance to proc, however, after some testing I realized that is not the case. Both the mana return and the damage done by the trinket is called “Detonate Mana”. From what I can tell, the mana is always a return of 4200 (which is an astounding 25,000 mana in a 6 minute fight!), but the damage done by the trinket far exceeds that. I had hits on a single target that ranged from 4369 to 8700, with very limited testing. And, on some AE things over the past few days, I’ve seen hits exceed 40,000 damage. Which makes me wonder how the trinket plays out for a DPS class, assuming of course that it is already quite good due to the static intellect attribute of the trinket.

In short, I’ve been very pleased with the trinket since I have acquired it. I would absolutely recommend grinding it out if you are on the fence about acquiring one.

As for the rest of Beru’s gear, I’ve basically finished out my “346” set, and my only upgrades will now come from raiding and valor points.

On Time Sinks

Archeology seems to be the mother of all time sinks. And now that I’m entrenched in it, I can’t seem to find a way out. So I pull out a movie, toss it in, and dig. I’m sure that right as I “finish” with it, Blizzard will unleash that 8th, as yet undiscoverable, race that we see in the interface, and then I’ll have to start all over again.

Of course, just about everything that I want is in Uldum and the digsites there are so rare. I really with that after you’ve “completed” a race tree and obtained all of the rare items from the tree, the other digsites would be favored to spawn.

On Twilight Jasmine

I hate it. It’s used for everything…and in very high quantity. It’s over farmed, and there are too few nodes in the zone since the nerf, and I’ve yet to find a consistently good “farming path” for it. Honestly, if you are going to require 12 herbs for a flask, it really should be a bit easier to obtain. This herb is the bane of my existence right now. I loathe having to farm for it and I loathe having to use it, because it means I will have to go and farm more. Oh…and while I am ranting about herbing:

On Phased Gathering Nodes

PLEASE FIX THIS! There is absolutely nothing more frustrating that trying to farm herbs than having half of your nodes phase out as you approach them. Sure it wasn’t the intent that nodes were phased, was it? I mean, they weren’t in any of the WotLK zones, so I can only assume that it’s a bug here. Right now, Twilight Jasmine (and herbing in Twilight Highlands) basically does nothing but piss me off.

On Deepsea Sagefish Pools

Speaking of things that are pissing me off….

Why are there no deepsea sagefish pools? Almost every caster is going to want 90 int or 90 spirit food, and yet we can’t fish them out of a pool? WTF! Not only do we get screwed trying to help our guild fish their fish feast up by having to cast outside of pools, we get MURGLESNORT (or whatever the heck it’s called). I get about 3 murglesnort to every 1 sagefish that I catch. AND THERE ISN’T EVEN A RECIPE FOR THAT STUPID FISH!

I can only hope that this was an oversight, and that soon, in one of these GC posts or patch notes that are coming up we will see “deepsea sagefish have decided to be more social, and can now be found swimming together in pools”.

On Non-WoW things

I saw True Grit over the weekend. It was amazing. Go see it!

I got a Xbox/Kinect for Christmas, and I’m loving it. I have just two games for it (Kinect Adventures and Dance Central), but I’ve had a lot of fun (and a good workout!) from both. If anyone else has any experiences with some of the other games out that they’d recommend, please let me know!

All in all

I’ve been enjoying the new content. I’m really looking forward to pushing forward with our 25 man team and seeing where we will go. I’m also having a good deal of fun working through the content in our 10 mans, and will only believe that our 25s will be smoother as a result of the experience.

How have you been spending your time? What Cataclysm things are really bothering you?

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If you intend to use anything on this website, please have the courtesy to attribute what you share, and offer links back to this site. If you are unsure if you can use the content found here, please do not hesitate to contact me directly. ~Beru